As he prepares to release his new film Hunky Dory, Welsh director Marc Evans tells Ciaran Jones why he now has Dame Shirley Bassey in his sights

As he prepares to release his new film Hunky Dory, Welsh director Marc Evans tells Ciaran Jones why he now has Dame Shirley Bassey in his sights

HE is the Welsh- born director who has returned to his roots to create a musical tribute to the sounds of a sweltering ’70s summer in Swansea.

And now Carmarthen-born filmmaker Marc Evans is set to take on one of his biggest challenges yet with a big screen profile of a young Dame Shirley Bassey, set in the gritty Cardiff docklands where she grew up and documenting her rise to stardom.

Speaking to the Western Mail ahead of the release of his new film – feel-good musical Hunky Dory, starring Minnie Driver as a maverick teacher cajoling her dysfunctional charges to produce an end-of-term musical in the blistering summer of 1976 – Evans says: “Jon [Finn] and myself, who produced Hunky, we’ve got a really great script about Wigan casino, Northern Soul, another musical film, more about dancing than performing.

“Then I’ve got another script which is looking pretty good actually which is the story of the young Shirley Bassey in the Tiger Bay days, so that’s a visit back to Wales of the ’50s and London of the ’50s which is quite an interesting period to explore.

“They keep popping up, these Welsh stories. I think as you get older they kind of do and you do sort of gravitate back to your background or want to revisit some of that sort of stuff.

“The thing about filmmaking is sometimes it’s interesting because it takes you to places you’ve never been before, both emotionally and physically, and then the other half of it, it’s a way of exploring who you are and where you come from so I suppose getting older it’s quite nice to have a few Welsh projects in the pipeline.”

Evans’ latest work – his first silver screen project since the release of Patagonia in 2010 – is set in Swansea during what would have been his own final year in secondary school.

But the Cardiff-based director says while some of the movie’s events were inspired and underpinned by real life, the plot was not modelled on his own childhood.

“It’s not autobiographical in the sense that there’s nobody in the film who’s me, because I couldn’t sing unfortunately, but it’s definitely my era and I do remember that summer very well.

“What I also remember very well in that age is the gaps in between things happening – just hanging out with your friends and having a laugh, so I wanted to capture that languid summer teenage existence and then also it was an opportunity to work with some of these young musicians and recreate some of my favourite music.”

He describes creating the film alongside producer Finn and writer Laurence Coriat as being “almost like a therapy session”.

“Most of the scenes in the film are inspired by some kind of true event – the gym did burn down in our school, some of the dialogue is actually verbatim from what our teachers said at the time and it’s all muddled up in a kind of alternative reality which isn’t anybody’s in particular.

“It was quite therapeutic sitting there and talking about your school days – it was an interesting exercise.”

But recreating the hottest summer in Britain since records began proved rather ambitious.

“Shooting the summer of 1976 on the west coast of Wales in 2010 was not a good idea, I can tell you that – we were just chasing the weather every day,” he admits.

“We deliberately went for ’76 mostly because of the weather. We were very inspired by all of those American high school movies and how American cinema is full of these films in which kids hang out – they always go to school in their cars, don’t they, and hang out on the campus and we wanted to celebrate the British version of that so ’76 was the hottest summer in living memory and my memory of it was much more like those films.

“And then cut to 2010 and you’re in Swansea and Port Talbot and it’s the west coast and you can see the storm clouds coming in. On a 35-day shoot you just have to be fast and loose and go ‘We’re all going inside now’.

“There was no point shooting [in bad weather] – you can’t create sunshine on film. For all the special effects that are out there you just can’t do that so we were just continually at the mercy of the weather and it was quite a tough shoot from that point of view.”

As well as the weather, the period’s distinctive music is one of the defining features of the film – and indeed its title is borrowed from David Bowie’s fourth album, released in 1971.

Evans says the makers were striving for “something very familiar, often, but something that sounded a bit different, a bit other, a bit weird and interesting”.

He adds: “So we picked a lot of songs that had that kind of ’70s glam, sexually confused outer-space feel to them and that was the guide really – songs that we felt at the time allowed teenagers, who are quite often quite alienated, messed-up creatures, allowed them to unlock their imagination and for their imagination to take flight.”

Hunky Dory opens in cinemas on Friday. A soundtrack is available from Decca

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